It seems that we are finally coming to a point in time in which when a movie is coming from WWE studios you no longer cringe. We have a few movies coming out from them but the movie to kick off their recent horror productions is Oculus… honestly a movie that I really wasn’t all that interested in seeing. I know that doesn’t start the review very well but this movie was picked for a recent movie night and it was what we started the night with. For those interested in this movie you can thank Katie for the fact that we watched this.

The movie premise is simple yet they managed to try something a little different with this haunted film. Yes this is a haunting but it is not a place or a person this time but an object. A mirror and through this mixed storyline we get to see what is causing some of the craziness. This mirror is somehow connected to a bunch of different killings in its history and one sibling is determined to stop it, she decided to recruit her poor brother who has just gotten released from a mental institute. Frankly I think this makes her a bit of a jerk but that is my opinion.

Anyways the mirror seems to be able to influence and control people making them torture and kill in horrendous ways. Now the movie is put together so that the powers of the mirror are shown in small bits by using constant changes between the past and present. Now this can be a little jarring and it seems to be designed to do that… a lot of the narrative is done like this in an attempt to keep you on your toes. This works some of the time, others times you wish that it would just pick one for a little bit.

The main characters are played by Brenton Thwaites and Karen Gillian. For those of you who are like me, Gillian’s claim to fame is that fact that she was on Dr. Who so fan boys flocked to this because of her. Both of them were alright in their roles, they played very different characters from each other like most brother and sisters are. Sadly, I felt like having her in the film was underwhelming considering all of the praise she gets. We also get Rory Cochrane (Speed from CSI: Miami) and Katee Sackhoff who had solid performances and were easily able to keep up with Thwaites and Gillian.

There is some gore in this movie, the worst of it deals with things around the mouth. We get to see some teeth being removed once some glass in another person’s mouth. Other than that I felt like the movie was mostly tame, there is violence but it’s nothing you wouldn’t find on TV now,

Now honesty this is not a movie for me. I felt like the whole thing could have been avoided if they were smart enough and there were a ton of plot holes. I think this movie would be fine for casual horror fans but not something for hardcore fans.